Short Abstract

This roundtable explores what trees afford to the polarised conflicts on human-environment relations. As trees are pitted against each other and fall in conflict with human projects, we discuss how anthropology can go beyond anthropocentrism to understand the roles trees play in these polarisations.

Long Abstract

What roles do living and agentic trees play in a world of polarisations? From ecosystem services to intimate kin, from invasive enemies to allies in climate change mitigation, from valuable additions to landscapes to hazards to structures and human health, trees occupy a highly contested place in modern constructions and imaginings of human-environment relations – not only as symbols but also as subjects of political struggles. This panel explores how to read such political struggles and tensions from an anthropological perspective, moving beyond anthropocentrism, and recognising what trees afford to the discourses, actions, and transformations that take shape around them.

Trees have been essential in settler colonial projects–remember the pine trees planted in Palestine, displacing the olives and the native bushes–, major subjects in fights against extraction, as in the Chipko movement fighting against logging by hugging the trees in India and achieving the climate change mitigation and biodiversity goals through reforestation and conservation. In these, we see two modalities of polarisation: a) trees pitted against each other–hence one tree species against another, and b) trees threatened by and pitted against development projects–hence tree wellbeing positioned against unequally distributed human benefits, such as wealth, housing, electricity…etc.

Against this backdrop, this roundtable discusses:

- What are the affordances of specific trees that inform, shape and affect these polarisations and political struggles?

- How can we account for tree temporalities, which go well beyond human life spans and mastery, in invocations of pasts and futurings coming from different political directions?

- What does an anthropology which goes beyond anthropocentrism tell us about human-tree relations and alliances, ranging from intimate care to bare violence under volatile circumstances?